Last Tuesday I had the honour to watch a live talk by the creators of the film Wolfwalkers, Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, hosted by Kaboom Festival. In this lecture, the creators spoke about the whole process of creating Wolfwalkers and it was truly inspiring.
I must confess I hadn’t watched it until right before the talk began, but I watched it on the day and it was wonderful! The only film I had watched by Cartoon Saloon to date was ‘The Breadwinner’ and when I discovered they were also the creators of ‘Wolfwalkers’, I was stocked!
The Irish folklore story tells a tale of two girls in different worlds. Robyn’s world is told as ‘rigid and like a cage for Robyn and for all the people being oppressed by this new regime’ by director Ross Stewart, 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYxIFV7DNo). The square plain environment portrays this cold crude wood cut world the character’s stuck in. On the other hand, Mebh’s world is described as ‘free and instinctual, loose and colourful’ through the use water colour and hand drawn shapes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYxIFV7DNo). When the two worlds meet, you can easily distinguish which elements belong to the city life and which ones belong in nature, by the stylised contrast of line quality and weight.
The style of the animation has been described as ‘pre-celtic megalithic’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjp9BJ9Ht5c), a style that follows the one adopted in Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey, 2009) and Song of the Sea (Tomm Moore, 2014). These are considered a trilogy by director Ross Stewart. Also found it super interesting to look at the behind of scenes of production and see the different lines of work!
In addition, ‘The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya‘ (Studio Ghibli, 2014) was key inspiration for this film, as stated by director Tomm Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjp9BJ9Ht5c). Takahata proved that computer generated animation could have the same loose and expressive feel as hand drawn animation and this led Moore to go to town with exploring contrasting styles within the same film, which is something so characteristic of Wolfwalkers.
To understand further expand my research about Cartoon Saloon’s films, I procured information about Tomm Moore’s work and came across this documentary.
It’s remarkable to see how Moore utilises contemporary artists such as Kandinsky as inspiration for his work! ‘Song of the Sea’ is a great example of this.
source: (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kandinsky-swinging-t02344)
source: https://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/wolfwalkers/
This film personally attracts me through its animation style. The highly geometrical, roughly drawn, however organic characters contrasting with the almost two-dimensionally distorted rigid backgrounds is a style that has always resonated to me from young age.
Cartoon Saloon is the perfect envision of what I’d like to achieve in my career as an animator. I’ll surely be keeping an eye on their future work.